1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image search system, an image search apparatus, an image search method, and a computer-readable storage medium having an image search program stored therein for imaging, for example, a flower and identifying the flower.
2. Description of the Related Art
People may want to know the name of a flower seen in the fields or by the roadside. A technology has been suggested in which a target plant such as a flower is imaged, a feature amount is extracted from the imaged flower, and a search for the target plant is made from a database having stored therein names and families of nationwide wild plants, their feature amount information corresponding to the feature amount, and plant sample images (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (Kokai) Publication No. 2007-133816).
In another suggested technology (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (Kokai) Publication No. 2002-203242), from digital images of flowers and leaves, images of a flower and a leaf of a target are extracted by using a clustering method, and information obtained from the extracted flower and leaf is taken as a feature amount. A single or plurality of feature amounts are thus found, and the found feature amounts and feature amounts of various plants registered in a database in advance are analyzed by using a statistical scheme to determine the wild plant type.
A technology of dividing an image including a main subject such as a flower into a flower area and a background image area by using a Graph Cuts method has been suggested in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (Kokai) Publication No. 2011-035636.
However, in the technologies disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (Kokai) Publication No. 2007-1333816 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (Kokai) Publication No. 2002-203242, the recognition ratio is on the order of 55%, and a selecting process with human eyes is inevitably indispensable. In the conventional technologies, a user interface for letting a person to select does not always have excellent usability.